The Transformation of the World (95 page)

It has often been claimed that High Imperialism was a direct result of industrialization, but things are not so simple. With the exception of Africa, the greatest territorial expansion took place
before
the industrialization of the imperial power in question: the Tsarist Empire in Siberia, the Black Sea, the steppes, and the Caucasus; the Qing expansion in Central Asia; the British conquest of India. India became an important market for British industry
after
it was conquered. Similarly, Malaya was not gradually brought under British control
in order to
open up access to rubber; its importance soon afterward as a supplier is another story. But it is true that there were indirect connections, for example, the American sales of the Lancashire cotton industry brought in Mexican silver that helped to finance Lord Wellesley's Indian conquests.
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Industrialization does not necessarily push countries into an imperialist policy. If industrial
capacity had translated directly into international strength, Belgium, Saxony, and Switzerland would have been aggressive great powers by 1860. The hunt for raw materials and “state-protected” markets—a hope repeatedly disappointed—was sometimes a not-insignificant motive; it played a certain role in France, for example. But not until the twentieth century did governments come to see control over foreign resources as a
national
objective of prime importance. Oil was the main spur for this strategic upgrading of raw materials, which began in the years before the First World War. Until then both resource extraction and direct capital investment had been a matter for private firms, although these could be sure of their government's support on an unprecedented scale. Imperialist politics in the second age of global imperialism was largely a matter of garnering favorable plantation, timber, mining, railroad, and canal concessions for private European business interests.
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In the last third of the nineteenth century, an overall restructuring of the world economy was everywhere in evidence. Economic globalization was not a direct result of government policies but stood in a two-way relationship with it. Raw materials were no longer stolen but, rather, acquired through a mixture of extraction systems (e.g., plantations) and commercial incentives. The “mix of compliance mechanisms” changed, also depending on the type of colony.
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What direct effects did industrialization have on methods of imperial warfare? The conquest of India in 1800 was still accomplished with preindustrial military technology. Wellesley's chief adversaries, the Marathas, even had the better artillery (maintained by German mercenaries), but they were unable to deploy it to advantage.
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Only steam-powered gunships brought industrial technology decisively into play, for the first time in the Anglo-Burmese war of 1823–24, and then in the Opium War against China in 1841.
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A second phase of colonial conquest took place under the aegis of a (by European standards) relatively simple innovation: the Maxim gun. Invented in 1884, it was capable in the 1890s of turning clashes between European and indigenous troops into outright massacres.
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The key factor was not the absolute level of industrial and technological development in the imperial heartland, but the capacity for coercion on the spot. Industrial strength had to be translated into
local
superiority case by case. Had this not been so, Britain would not have come off worse in the Second Afghan War (1878–90), or the United States in a whole series of twentieth-century interventions (Vietnam, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc.).

Not all imperialisms were equally active in the nineteenth century, and the differences between them did not follow the dividing line between land and sea powers. Three imperial powers in the European system of states were active all through the century: the United Kingdom, Russia, and France. Germany joined in as a colonial power in 1884, but under Bismarck it did not yet consciously pursue a
Weltpolitik
. This would be the Wilhelmine watchword around the turn of the century, once the modest colonial empire was felt to be too restrictive. Austria was a great power, though of second rank since the Prussian triumphs
of 1866–71, and it was also an empire, though it did not pursue a policy of imperialist expansion. The Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain, none of them a great power, kept up old colonial possessions without adding anything major. The Chinese and Ottoman empires, once highly bellicose and dynamic, were now on the defensive in relation to Europe (though China less so than the Ottomans). From 1895 on, Japan was a very active imperialist player. The empires of the nineteenth century differed in terms of their imperialist intensity. What might seem at first sight, or in a very abstract theoretical perspective, to be a single closed imperialist system breaks down on closer inspection into imperialisms in the plural.

5 Central and Marginal Cases

The Habsburg Monarchy

The typical empire cannot be found in historical reality. And even a neat typology fails because of the multiplicity of possible criteria. Individual cases are able to be defined, however, through a comparison of their specific characteristics.

An extreme case was the Habsburg Empire.
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It was territorially overburdened and penned in: an empire in the heart of Europe, the only one with problematic access to the sea (military ports of Trieste and Pula) and no navy worth mentioning.
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Metternich maintained at the Congress of Vienna that Austria had reached its optimum extent, rejecting any further attempt at expansion.
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Yet he subsequently condoned the acquisition of Lombardy and the Veneto, and Austria soon warmed to the idea of becoming a major power in Italy. It remained so until 1866. The occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, followed by its annexation in 1908 that began the countdown to the First World War, was less an act of calculated empire building than an anti-Serbian and anti-Russian thrust by an irresponsible war party at the Viennese court.
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No one wanted to bring the two million South Slavs of Bosnia into the empire, upsetting the delicate balance of nationalities, and so Bosnia-Herzegovina was incorporated with
Reichsland
status, which expressed the awkwardness of its position.

In no other empire was the term “colony” so out of place as in the Habsburg Monarchy; there was not even a disadvantaged “internal colony,” such as Ireland represented in relation to England. Yet the imperial and royal (
kaiserlich und königlich
, or k.u.k.) monarchy displayed many features of an empire.
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It was a weakly integrated multiethnic entity, a collection of territories with often ancient historical identities of their own. Hungary, in particular, which in 1867 agreed to a constitutional settlement as a semiautonomous kingdom (King Franz Joseph being represented in Budapest by a Habsburg archduke), had its own government and two-chamber parliament within the newly created Dual Monarchy. After the German-Austrians, no other ethnic group in the empire now had such a strong position as the Magyars. In fact, Hungary was placed comparably to the Dominion of Canada (formally created also in 1867) within the British Empire.
In both cases, the imperial framework was not experienced as coercive: Hungarians, like Canadians, could make a career for themselves within it; economic development was not seriously impeded by the imperial center, and much of the state expenditure was shared.
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Like the British Empire, the Danube Monarchy did not develop into a federation; the whole state actually became more heterogeneous after 1867. The Slav nationalities rightly felt themselves to be the losers and, not seeing the emperor as an a neutral arbiter of interests, inwardly distanced themselves from the settlement. Right to the end, the various components of the Habsburg Monarchy were integrated in the imperial manner: a shared imperial culture and identity took shape to some extent, without being politically enforced, while horizontal
social
integration continued to be restricted. The empire was held together only at the top, through the symbols of monarchy and a multinational officer corps at least as mixed in composition as its counterparts in early modern Spain or British India. Yet it did not appear to most of its inhabitants as a military state. Only the Italians in Lombardy-Veneto had the sense of being under tyrannical alien rule. In a divided region such as Galicia, the Austrian part was typically far more liberal, as well as more enlightened than the Russian or Prussian zone, including toward its large Jewish population. The national groups that had been part of the Habsburg Empire for centuries were rather wary about their relations with one another. The notorious Habsburg “nationalities question” bore less on the links of peripheral regions with the center (as in the Tsarist Empire) than on their own conflictual relations with one another; Hungary, for example, had explosive minority problems of its own.
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The Habsburg Empire was unique in having no remnants of an open “barbarian frontier;” it no longer even had any settler colonialism. It was ethnically and culturally more uniform than the overseas empires of Western European powers, or than the Russian and Ottoman empires. Although the different languages, customs, and historical memories became ever more visible on the rising tide of national consciousness, all subjects of the emperor in Vienna had a white skin, and the great majority were Roman Catholics. Orthodox Serbs, the largest religious minority, made up just 3.8 percent of the population in 1910, and Muslims only 1.3 percent.
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Compare this with the share of non-Muslims in the officially Muslim Ottoman Empire (roughly 40 percent before the major territorial losses in the Balkans after 1878) and of non-Orthodox in the officially Christian Orthodox Tsarist Empire (29 percent in 1897), or even with the situation in the British Empire, where all skin colors and all world religions were represented, and where Hinduism was numerically the preponderant religious orientation.
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Even if people in Vienna, Budapest, or Prague looked on South Slavs or the Romanian minority as “barbarians,” these peoples did not fit into the Western European, Russian, or Chinese discourse of noble and ignoble “savages.” The Habsburg Empire was geographically and culturally a European/Western multinational structure. The equality of all citizens before the law made it in principle one of the most modern and “civic” of empires.
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But this was not
true in every respect. A sense of nationhood was more developed among Hungarians and Czechs, at least, than among German Austrians. In 1900 the latter did not yet constitute a nation, let alone a ruling one. Elsewhere in the world, a nation-state of the titular nation slumbered beneath the casing of the imperial metropolis, ready to stand on its own feet after the loss of peripheral regions; the Turkish Republic, for instance, emerged with astonishing speed out of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. Not so in the Danube Monarchy. In this respect it was the most antiquated of all the empires, and therefore not by chance one of the first to disappear from the map.

The general secession that put an end to it has only one parallel: the decomposition of the Soviet Union in 1990–91. It followed military defeat in a world war that had strengthened rather than weakened in internal cohesion of the British Empire. Nevertheless, the most appropriate comparison is with that empire: Lombardy, Hungary, and the Czech lands had built up their respective nations within the Danube Monarchy so successfully that, like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, they emerged from their imperial past without major convulsions as politically and economically viable nation-states. The same cannot be claimed of the Middle Eastern and Balkan successor states of the Ottoman Empire. At the other end of the spectrum lies the Chinese Empire, which suffered only one breakaway in modern times: Outer Mongolia in 1911. This state, after an early shaky autonomy and sixty years as the longest-lived satellite of the Soviet Union, regained only in 1991 the independence it had lost in 1690.
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France's Four Empires

For centuries the House of Habsburg competed with France for supremacy in continental Europe. In 1809, when Napoleon drove the Austrian monarchy to the brink of collapse and occupied Vienna, two nearly pure continental empires faced each other. The Napoleonic Empire, though so short-lived that most of the literature does not regard it as such, was indeed an empire of the first water. Despite the subordination of politics to military affairs throughout the sixteen-year period, evident particularly in the constant quest for money and recruits, it is possible to identify certain systemic contours
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Two characteristics of empires in general were especially pronounced. First, Napoleon soon created a genuinely imperial ruling elite, which he allocated to, and rotated among, positions all over Europe; its core, the Bonaparte and Beauharnais families, supplied the most trusted marshals and a caste of professional administrators ready to serve anywhere.
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The empire of Napoleon, the last and greatest ruler of Enlightenment absolutism, was an ultrastatist structure built similarly throughout, which professed to modernize in the general interest but allowed its subjects no institutionalized voice or scope for action. Like any empire, it relied on the collaboration of indigenous rulers and elites, without whom it would not have been able to mobilize the resources of subject societies. But they did not have even the modicum of formal representation
granted under the British model.
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No empire of the eighteenth or nineteenth century was more highly centralized. A law or decree issued in Paris had immediate validity in every nook and cranny.

Second, the whole Napoleonic project of expansion was forced through with a cultural arrogance rarely seen elsewhere, even between Europeans and non-Europeans, before the later age of fully fledged racism. This imperiousness, based on a conviction that postrevolutionary secular France represented the pinnacle of enlightenment and civilization, made itself felt least in the core regions identified by Michael Broers (eastern France, the Netherlands, northern Italy, and the German Rhine Confederation), and especially in the “outer empire” made up, above all, of Poland, Spain, and Italy south of Genoa.
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Here the French conducted themselves as an occupying power, treating the “superstitious” and inefficient natives with contempt and engaging in outright colonial exploitation. The Napoleonic Empire exceeded all others in its objective of cultural uniformity. Influenced by Enlightenment utopias of a continent at perpetual peace with itself, Napoleon claimed in his memoirs to have dreamed of a united Europe “everywhere guided by the same principles, the same system.”
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First the non-French elites were to have been Gallicized, then a radical
mission civilisatrice
was to have freed the popular masses from the yoke of religion and localism. By 1808 this vision was already running into trouble in Spain.
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